Ah, the dreams of frustrated inventors. When every other issue of Popular Science is predicting flying cars just over the horizon, you almost start believing that traffic jams and rutted roads will become a thing of the past and that we will soon take to the skies en masse the same way we took to the streets in our regular, non-flying automobiles.
Gustave Berman very well may have bought into the fantasy. All we really know about him is that he operated Yale Clothing in Springfield, Massachusetts, a men’s clothing store that once operated out of Pittsfield and burned down in 1956, leading to a merger with another clothing store a year later. But in 1928, Berman applied for a design patent (D77,635) (via) for an automobile body adorned with wings, a propeller and tailsection.
Design patents don’t reveal much information, however. Nor are they like regular patents, in which they reveal the inner workings of a mechanism. Those caveats, combined with the obviously inefficient (as an aircraft) design shown in the drawings, I’d suspect that Berman never intended his design to literally fly; instead, it was probably a gimmick designed to capitalize on a flying car craze and be sold as a kit through some J.C. Whitney-type catalog.
Still, we can’t fault Berman for dreaming.